This book discusses in detail the latest trends in sentiment analysis,
focusing on "how online reviews and feedback reflect the opinions of
users and have led to a major shift in the decision-making process at
organizations." Social networking has become essential in today's
society. In the past, people's decisions to buy certain products (and
companies' efforts to sell them) were largely based on advertisements,
surveys, focus groups, consultants, and the opinions of friends and
relatives. But now this is no longer limited to one's circle of friends,
family or small surveys;it has spread globally to online social media in
the form of blogs, posts, tweets, social networking sites, review sites
and so on.
Though not always easy, the transition from surveys to social media is
certainly lucrative. Business analytical reports have shown that many
organizations have improved their sales, marketing and strategy, setting
up new policies and making decisions based on opinion mining techniques.